TRIANGLES OF TERROR TRILOGY, SIDE ONE: THE RULE OF THREE
Forty years since the Falklands War, SD TUCKER calculates the hidden occult angles behind the conflict, finding that, in Argentina’s politics, there are three sides to every story – and every triangle
On 2 April 1982 the ruling Argentinian military junta of General Leopoldo Galtieri decided to distract attention from their violent repression and economic misconduct at home by invading the nearby Falkland Islands, one of the few remaining microcrumbs of the once-mighty British Empire, something the aggressor nation’s feted star of absurdist fiction Jorge Luis Borges memorably compared to “a fight between two bald men over a comb”. For similar failures of tact, Borges had already once been ‘promoted’ from his privileged role as a librarian into the deliberately unsuitable position of Official Inspector of Rabbits at a Buenos Aires marketplace, a fate fit for one of his own characters.
Perhaps not wanting to one day end up in an even weirder job, Borges never penned any direct satires of his country’s many post-war dictators, but one of his literary progeny, Luisa Valenzuela, dared do so in her 1983 magic realist allegory
The Lizard’s Tail, a fable so fantastic that non-natives would struggle to perceive it is based on actual domestic political reality. Telling the story of a sinister, baby-eating figure named The Sorcerer and his quest to usurp all political rivals, the book features many unlikely events, from a national ban on mirrors to a magic fart so powerful it sets a whole swamp afire. Unlikeliest of all, this “necromant of confused gonads” is a hermaphroditic “magician of mere hormonal transformations” who selfidentifies using the “mutant pronoun” s/ he (how prophetic …), and possesses a holy “testicular trinity” of no fewer than three balls, one of which is his own sister, Estrella, in embryonic sperm-sack form. Via a process of “Theocopulation”, the triscrotal Sorcerer aims to self-impregnate him/herself to regenerate, Phoenix-style – an abortive procedure which ultimately only unleashes a massive river of blood upon the land.
To us, all of this may seem as random as transmogrifying a literary genius like Borges into a rabbit inspector, but to an Argentine reader, the novel’s strange testicular trinity is clearly an obscene and mocking metaphor for recently pressing home affairs. The plot centres upon not only a triad of testes, but also a triad of three other main characters corresponding to them: a human pyramid. A kind of political love-triangle prevails, involving figures named The Generalissimo and (two sides of the same ball) his deceased wife, The Dead Woman, and her younger living replacement, The Intruder. These would have been immediately recognisable to Valenzuela’s compatriots as being Argentina’s former military dictator General Juan Domingo Perón, his late wife Eva/Evita Perón, and his next spouse, Isabel Perón, who replaced Juan as President following his death in 1974 (thus magically morphing into his feminine side). As for The Sorcerer himself… we shall not unmask him just yet, but when Isabel rose to power, this dark mage was the true authority behind
The Intruder’s throne: a mass-murdering astrologer obsessed with pyramids, triangles and other such occult manifestations of the magic number three.
THE LOST VIKINGS
Juan Perón was no occultist himself, but gladly allowed people to think otherwise if it was to his own personal benefit. A consummate opportunist, he sired the paradoxical doctrine of ‘Perónism’, or ‘The Third Position’, which was neither truly leftnor right-wing, but held both potentialities equally latent within itself, like the male and female aspects within The Sorcerer’s gonads. Perón cynically, or foolishly, allowed rival leftist and rightist camps to develop amongst his followers and then violently split to the extent that, eventually, they shot one another dead in the streets – thus, the third, centrist testicle that was Perón was torn asunder once his right and left legs finally did the full splits, unleashing rivers of blood nationwide.
An army officer, Perón had gone to Europe in a diplomatic role in 1938, where he grew to admire the similar ‘Third Position’ of Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy, whose doctrines seemed partway between socialism and capitalism, championing trade unionism and the welfare state from the left, and belligerent nationalism, enforced social order and military aggression from the right – a form of ‘National Socialism’, if you will. In 1941, Perón returned home, was promoted to Colonel, and joined GOU, a secret military cabal which launched a successful coup in 1943. All Perón asked was the middling role of Labour and Welfare Minister, knowing full well this would allow him to accumulate a handy power-base amongst the workers and hordes of poor descamisados, or ‘shirtless ones’, to aid his further rise later on.
Perón was not literally a Nazi, but during his first spell as President from 1946-55, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise; he called the Nuremberg Trials “a disgrace” and “an unfortunate lesson for the future of humanity”, which made him wish the Allies had lost. There was already a large, pro-Hitler body of German immigrants in Argentina, and following Nazi defeat, aided
A MAGIC FART SO POWERFUL IT SETS A WHOLE SWAMP ON FIRE
by anti-Communist elements in the Vatican, Perón set up ‘ratlines’ to smuggle warcriminals into the country to exploit their technical and administrative knowledge, including such notorious genocidal nuts as Josef Mengele, Adolf Eichmann and Klaus Barbie. Some more obscure imports held weird, esoteric ideas; notably, there was Ronald Richter, a quack who wasted millions trying to build Perón a special new kind of reactor that would allow pure, concentrated nuclear power to be delivered free to voters’ doorsteps inside milk-bottles, and Jacques de Mahieu, a French WaffenSS man who really should have joined Himmler’s Ahnenerbe pseudo-archæology unit (see FT175:30-39, 196:32-39) instead. Taken under Perón’s wing, Mahieu wrote speeches for his new Führer, helping formulate Perónist economic policy and lecturing to the Armed Forces. In return, he was granted top academic roles, becoming Deputy Rector at the Buenos Aires Institute of Human Studies.
Yet Mahieu’s scholarship, like Perón’s politics, had two sides. Alongside texts like The Communal Economy, he also produced such screeds as The Imposture of Christopher Columbus and The Secret Geography of America. A proud “scientific racist”, he used his pulpit as Professor of Anthropology to push works like The Viking King of Paraguay, arguing that Aryan Vikings had really found the Americas, not Columbus, and that these white warriors had formed the true elite of the Inca Empire. Mahieu felt pure white Nordic Europeans were a special “solar race” whose destiny was to rule the world, hence the frequent Latin American worship of sun-gods – i.e. ancient euhemerised white folk. Following the Vikings into the New World were Knights Templar from Mahieu’s own French Heimat, bringing the primitive
Indians the basics of civilisation. Argentina had been especially favoured by these early settlers, bolstering its ruling class’s self-image as the whitest, most European and refined of all South American nations; the Nazis who sailed there post-1945 were thus recast as heroic latter-day Vikings, not genocidal cowards fleeing justice. “The masses are easier to move with myth than with culture,” Mahieu once said, a lesson he had clearly learned from Hitler, and one that President Perón himself soon began applying to his own rule.
BASHING THE BISHOPS
Perón’s political platform was called the Justicialist Party, which preached a doctrine of justicialismo, or ‘social justice’ – but the word ‘justice’ means different things to different people. At first, Argentina’s powerful Catholic Church, impressed by the way Perón pandered to the poor by nationalising industries, mandating wage increases and implementing huge programmes of public works, thought this plan of social justice – resembling as it did the old corporatist ‘Christian Economics’ of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, who had also preached a ‘Third Way’ between capitalism and Communism – meant Perón was one of them. Pope Pius had looked favourably upon Mussolini’s economic reforms, viewing the natural unity between individual worker, trade union and State in Italy’s fascist model as imitating the natural unity of the (nontesticular) Holy Trinity. Would Perónist Argentina now become a sort of Catholic dictatorship? Only in the sense that Perón began acting as if he were Christ.
Initially anti-Marxist allies, the Church soon became estranged as Perón’s welfare state assumed many of its old povertyrelieving duties, robbing priests of influence over their flocks, and introduced educational reforms into the once heavily Catholiccontrolled school system. Disliking Perón’s secularising changes, Catholics even decried the introduction of compulsory PE and Personal Hygiene lessons as promoting a sinful focus on the human body. The year 1948 saw elements of parapsychology placed on the official school curriculum, and when blasphemous classroom propaganda portraying the President and his wife Evita as living saints to rival the Church’s traditional dead ones was further used to indoctrinate children, the Church accused Perón’s Education Minister of being a covert Freemason out to kill Christianity. In 1954 the Justicialists sought to suppress religious education in schools further, besides legalising brothels and divorce and formally separating Church and State. Bishops condemned Perón during a Corpus Christi parade; Perónist mobs burned down churches in return. In 1955, naval aircraft painted with the message “CHRIST WINS!” dropped bombs on crowds, much as Jesus would have wanted, the first stage in a new rebel military coup which removed Perón from power that September.
Earlier, Perón had sought to discredit the bishops by promoting freedom of worship for any and all other spiritual creeds, whether Christian or openly occult in nature, as one of his modernising reforms; one example was lending official legal status to Rosicrucianism. Billed purely as enabling freedom of personal conscience, this was actually intended to signal the only true approved creed in town was now that of justicialismo. A person who simply attends Mass every Sunday, Perón said in 1950, “is not a good Christian”. So who was a good Christian, then? Perónist politicians, of course, who did not merely light candles
and say ‘Amen’, but actually attempted to put Christ’s message into action. Perónism, he said, “is an effective, real and honest way of doing Christianity” – unlike, say, actual Christianity.
One group that benefited from this new policy line was the Basilio Scientific School, a reincarnation cult adhering to the teachings of the Victorian-era French Spiritualist Allan Kardec, with thousands of acolytes nationwide. In 1948 the School had been banned, but in 1950 Perón legalised it again, allowing them to hold a mass rally in a public stadium advertised by the provocative slogan “JESUS IS NOT GOD!”. Here, a personal letter from Juan and Evita was read out to the crowd, admiring the group’s message which, oddly enough, partly chimed with their own. The ‘Basilio’ in the cult’s title refers to a ghost of that name who, together with Jesus and the Virgin Mary, provided spirit messages to the sect’s founders, revealing the modern-day Catholic Church was a sham that had split from the true, original form of Christianity – which had never claimed Jesus was God at all, so the spooks said – as far back as the fourth century. Perón, then, was clearly correct when he suggested the current Church were not true Christians: Jesus Himself said so, and any Catholics in the crowd who disagreed were arrested. Later, the School, now a hotbed of Perónism, began channelling the spirit of Evita at their mass gatherings, following her death from cancer in 1952, so she really must have been a secular saint, just as the Perónist classroom textbooks said.
Even better, in 1954 a Pentecostal preacher from the United States named Theodore ‘Tommy’ Hicks turned up at the offices of the Casa Rosada (the ‘Pink House’ – Argentina’s baby-pink White House equivalent) seeking an audience with Perón, proclaiming the President had been chosen to fulfil an important mission from God. While praying in Florida one day, Hicks had suddenly enjoyed a vision of a map of South America, filled with a giant, pampas-sized field of golden wheat just ready to be harvested. Suddenly, the stalks became human bodies with hands stretched aloft crying for “Brother Hicks” to deliver them into salvation. The penniless Hicks knew nothing of South America, and spoke not a word of Spanish, but by some miracle scrabbled together enough cash for a one-way flight to Argentina, upon which, for no apparent reason, the magic word “Perón … Perón …” kept echoing through his mind. Hicks had never heard of such a fellow, so asked the stewardess if she knew who it might be. Upon being told Perón was the President, Hicks wasted little time in invading the Casa Rosada and demanding an audience via an interpreter. The Minister of Worship said it was impossible to allow random strangers to see his boss, until an underling limped into the office with a swollen knee. Hicks got down on his own knees, fondled the injured joint and prayed to God – whereupon, Hallelujah, the leg was healed! “Can I see the President now?” Tommy asked. The awed Minister said yes.
Inside Perón’s office, Hicks quickly cured the President’s psoriasis via the Power of the Lord, and the grateful leader asked what he could do in return. Hicks requested a large football stadium and free advertising in national media so he could hold mass revival meetings to heal the sick through prayer, so converting the nation to more Evangelical ways. Not only did Hicks make Perón’s skin as pink and smooth as the stones of the Casa Rosada, he now also presented him with an excellent new way to undermine the Catholic Church, so permission was instantly granted, with free police crowd-control thrown in for good measure. Hicks’s Billy Graham-like crusade was a great success, with millions attending his rallies, and innumerable crutches – but sadly, to recall Anatole France’s classic barb about Lourdes, no wooden legs – being hurled away by happy converts. When Catholic doctors objected to Perón allowing Hicks to ‘cure’ people in public like this, he coolly replied: “I must conclude he has the backing of Almighty God, and I can do nothing about that.” That’s what Perónist media said happened anyway, and their Word was surely Gospel.
THE CHOSEN JUAN
Meanwhile, in neighbouring Brazil, another sect was seeking to seduce a quasi-dictatorial national leader in the shape of Getúlio Vargas, “The Father of the Poor”, a populist strongman who twice served as his nation’s president, between 1930-45 and 1951-54. An equally half-left, half-right demagogue in the same mould as Perón, Vargas had faded from public life following his ousting by opponents in 1945. Would he ever return? Vargas had no time for the occult, but his daughter Alzira did, learning in 1946 that a part-Italian cult-leader living in Rio de Janeiro named Menotti Carnicelli had made contact with the Archangel Anael, who was providing celestial prophecies about her father.
Carnicelli was the current meat-vehicle for a truly great soul who in previous lives had solidified into the shape of such notables as
THE PENNILESS HICKS KNEW NOTHING OF SOUTH AMERICA
Confucius, Demosthenes and Archimedes, so seemed worth listening to. Joining his ‘Occult University’, Alzira was told daddy’s fall from grace, like that of Lucifer, had a “cosmic significance”, being intended only to let his people know what they were missing without him, thus facilitating his imminent re-arrival as dictator by popular demand in a “national consecration” of his rule. Once back on top, Vargas could then be advised by Carnicelli/ Anael about what precise policy avenues to pursue. Number one on the list was to create the new nation of ‘ABC’, a triple union of Argentina, Brazil and Chile, a triangular world superpower able to combat the evil, world-dominating triad of capitalist America, Imperialist Britain and Communist Russia. Vargas’s ideological “cousin”, Perón, would surely be willing to help this project for Third World freedom – which he actually was.
Although they never met, Perón, recognising an ally, did indeed flirt with ideas of an ABC super-state, providing aid to Vargas during his 1950 re-election campaign. But Carnicelli’s initial prophecies of Alzira’s father’s imminent revival kept on being postponed, and when he terrifyingly broke into her mother’s house to sit there babbling endless disturbing facts about triangles to her, Alzira finally broke with him. Getúlio had never cared about the holy man anyway, and when he did return to power in 1951 it had little to do with angelic intervention. In 1954, the President shot himself when about to be toppled once more by rival factions in the military, all of which had gone unforeseen by Anael. “Sincerely, I take my first step on the road to Eternity. I leave Life to enter History,” read Vargas’s suicide note.
The mystic Carnicelli now required another vessel for his ABC ambitions, so switched focus across the border he hoped one day to erase and sought to cast his spell over Juan Perón instead. Incredibly, he succeeded.
Over in Argentina, leadership of what became known as the Anael Lodge passed to an auctioneer named Héctor Caviglia, who knew Perón personally and acted as an intermediary between him and Vargas’s followers in Brazil. Caviglia, impressed by his charisma, developed a fantastic theory that Juan Perón’s hands were actually a form of disguised radar dishes, able to capture astral rays from the stars above, which he then broadcast out to his adoring public in turn when standing on the balcony of the Casa Rosada and waving at them, leading Caviglia to dub his hero ‘The Cosmic Conductor of Argentina’. The invisible rays emitted from his hands would transmute his voters’ souls, just as the rays from Tommy Hicks’s hands could cure their gammy knees, allowing the citizenry to evolve into a new form of Nazi-echoing übermenschen who would seize geopolitical control from the US, UK and USSR, ushering humanity into the dawning Age of Aquarius. As well as an angel, Anael was now a fixed star, too, beaming evolutionary waves down to Earth to combat Marxism and capitalism alike, creating Heaven on Earth and so embodying the old hermetic doctrine of ‘As Above, So Below’. Following Caviglia’s death in 1964, leadership of the Lodge passed to a Perónist lawyer and judge named Julio César Urien; Anael himself had personally anointed Urien as boss one dark and stormy night. As Urien added to Lodge lore, it now transpired his guardian angel’s name was really an acronym, ANAEL, or Advanced Nationalist Argentina in Liberation (in English that would actually spell ANAL), which pithily summed up Urien’s desired geopolitical programme.
However, in 1955 the transmission of revolutionary rays had already been unavoidably interrupted by Perón being overthrown in yet another military coup, with the mobile radio-mast seeking refuge in exile in the fascist-friendly paradise of Spain under the (slightly grudging) ægis of Hitler’s old chum General Franco, the original caudillo whom all his later jackbooted South American kin sought to imitate. Perón’s reduced situation now reflected precisely that of Getúlio Vargas post-1945, with the isolated former leader potentially being vulnerable to influence from a smoothtalking occultist only too eager to whisper prophecies of future greatness into his ear like one of the Weird Sisters leading Macbeth on to his doom. Whereas the cultists had once tried to get at Vargas through his superstitious daughter, they now tried to access Perón through his equally gullible Evita-replacing wife Isabel Perón, very much the Lady Macbeth in this whole tragedy.
By now, the reader may naturally have concluded the original model for The Sorcerer of Luisa Valenzuela must have been one of the unholy occult trinity of Carnicelli, Caviglia or Urien: but no. Instead, as we shall see next time, at this point a new Prospero materialised on the stage, causing an outbreak of murderous mayhem every bit as hubristic as anything Shakespeare ever imagined – and, just like his spherically overendowed fictional counterpart in The Lizard’s Tail, this guy certainly had some balls.